| During my research for Reuters, I came across various
standards for system management.
There are many incompatible system management products
available from various vendors. Effort is invariably required to enable
an application to be managed by a specific product. Standards which
minimise the effort are particularly sought by organisations with
widely distributed computing devices (see Cisco, below).
The Desktop Management
Task Force (DMTF) was comissioned back in 1996 to implement
standards being produced by the Web Based Enterprise Management
initiative (an alliance including Cisco, Microsoft and Compaq). Work
has been done to produce a Common
Information Model (CIM). The CIM was designed to allow an
object-oriented description of an application in a common language. A
system management product that understands the CIM could be quickly
configured to manage that application. The major vendors have expressed
interest in and in some cases commitment to moving towards use of the
CIM.
Applications developed to be managed by one of these
products can't easily be managed by a different vendor's products.
Little work was done in the early days on standards for the protocols
used by management products to transfer the management information -
proprietary protocols were the norm. Subsequent DMTF work under the Web-Based Enterprise
Management (WBEM) initiative uses XML to allow inter-operability.
X/Open Company Ltd (now part of the Open Group) have been active in
producing standards
for system management for many years. Their standards now include
some developed jointly with the DMTF.
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